Library of Congress: New Online: Rhode Island Folklife Project Collection. “The Rhode Island Folklife Project Collection resulted from an ethnographic field project conducted from July 15 to December 31, 1979, by the American Folklife Center in cooperation with the Rhode Island Heritage Commission, the Rhode Island Council on the Arts and the Rhode Island Historical Society. The collection consists of approximately six linear feet of manuscripts and ephemera, 200 sound recordings and 17,000 photographs documenting the ethnic, regional and occupational traditions of Rhode Island, especially the ethnic arts of the African-American, French-Canadian, Greek, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Lithuanian, Narragansett, Polish, Portuguese and Ukrainian communities.”

MedicalXPress: New database to connect neurodegenerative disease community. “Researchers studying neurodegenerative disease can now look up cohort studies and make connections through a new online database. The JPND Global Cohort Portalopens in new window, created by the EU Joint Programme in Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND) for which the MRC is a founder member, is a searchable online database of neurodegenerative disease cohort studies.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BuzzFeed: Twitter Offered Russian TV Network 15% Of Its Total Share Of US Elections Advertising. “Twitter wanted RT to spend big ahead of the 2016 US election, offering a significant portion of its election-related ad inventory in return. The social media company offered the Russian state–owned television network up to a 15% share of voice (‘SOV’) on US election advertising — or the percent of all ads run on that topic — for $3 million.” My jaw, it is on the floor.

Ubergizmo: Instagram Stories & WhatsApp Status Boast 300M Daily Active Users. “While Snapchat’s Stories isn’t exactly a flop, in fact it seems to be doing quite well, it looks like Facebook might be having much better success with it. In a report from TechCrunch, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed that both Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status both now have 300 million daily active users. This is compared to Snapchat whose own daily active users is around 173 million, and presumably not all of them use the Stories feature either.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Next Web: This app is like Shazam for fonts. “WhatTheFont is a Shazam for fonts — a designer’s dream. The app is a mobile version of the website previously developed by MyFonts, and recognizes any font you point at with your camera, including a variation of similar fonts to go with it.”

Social Media Examiner: How to Use Influencer Marketing to Amplify Your Message. “Wondering if social media influencers can increase your company’s reach? Looking for tips to find and evaluate potential influencers for a professional fit? In this article, you’ll discover how all businesses, even B2Bs, can partner with influencers to elevate their messaging.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Slate: How Russia Used Instagram to Influence the 2016 Election. “It’s been a couple months since Facebook confirmed that fake accounts likely originating in Russia bought ads on the platform to sow discord during the 2016 presidential campaign. On Friday, the company revealed that its subsidiary Instagram was also used in an attempt to influence the election. And on Wednesday, as officials from Facebook, Google, and Twitter testified before Congress, House Democrats released examples of the Instagram posts in question.”

American Libraries: Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. “Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas coast as a Category 4 storm near Rockport the night of August 25. Although soon downgraded to a tropical storm the following afternoon, Harvey was responsible for 90 confirmed deaths in the US and up to $180 billion in damage, according to estimates by the governor’s office. On September 8, Congress passed a measure for a total of $15.3 billion in relief aid, taking quick action to help victims of the devastating floods. Depending on their location, some libraries sustained significant damage from the ensuing flood waters, while others escaped with only a little cleanup required. The flood also affected many librarians and other library workers due to the damage to their homes.”

South Coast Today: New Bedford Whaling Museum collection boasts treasures not often seen by public. “The key to that semi-locked door into the museum’s massive archives was provided by Whaling Museum Director of Collections D. Jordan Berson, a paper conservator by trade, and the featured speaker at the meeting last Thursday at Russells Mills Schoolhouse. Berson brought along a slideshow featuring some of the hundreds of items on permanent or rotating display at the downtown museum these days, such as the scrimshaw, harpoons, whale skeletons, and the portraits of ships and sea captains that most folks bring home as memories of a visit there. But more interesting were the slides of the thousands of square feet of storage space used to house that portion of the huge historical collection that generally never goes on display and probably never will.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Alabama at Birmingham: Study finds fringe communities on Reddit and 4chan have high influence on flow of alternative news to Twitter. “After analyzing millions of posts containing mainstream and alternative news shared on Twitter, Reddit and 4chan, Jeremy Blackburn, Ph.D., and collaborators found that alt-right communities within 4chan, an image-based discussion forum where users are anonymous, and Reddit, a social news aggregator where users vote up or down on posts, have a surprisingly large influence on Twitter. The results of the study were published this week in a paper at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in London.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!